No living dinosaurs in this image, apart from Nolo, Lara’s pet leptoceratops at the bottom. Instead, we see two of the most important dinosaurs in the novel, neither actually seen in the flesh until the third book. But we have a preview of them and their in-world mythological signifance in the statue that stands in Danatlan.

The tyrannosaurus rex is the Guardian of the Gates of the Dead, the monster of all oblivion that eats the souls of those who stray too far from their natural realms, the dead leaving their solemn city or the living who dare to venture there at all.

The stegosaurus represents the Amaranthine Beast, a creatures whose nature will only gradually be revealed, and then only partially. It is a combination of the dragon, the phoenix and the unicorn, with all their attendant folklore included. There was only one dinosaur that could fill this role. The stegosaurus, one of the most recognizable of all dinosaurs, lived only during the Jurassic era, dying out with all of its known relatives long before the late Cretaceous, when our story is set. In fact, more time separates stegosaurus from tyrannosaurus rex than separates tyrannosaurus from us. Therefore, if I was to include the stegosaurus, it had to be in some otherworldly capacity.

It’s an interesting choice, actually, given that many people believe to have found a depiction of a stegosaurus on the walls of the ancient Hindu temple known as Angkor Wat. It certainly looks like a stegosaurus, depictied many centuries before the first specimens were collected and documented. It’s probably just a rhinoceros, but that’s even better to me, since the rhinoceros was the origin of the unicorn myth to begin with. It’s all connected in an inexplicable way.